Fev: In My Own Words

by Brendan Fevola

  Mum couldn’t stand the sport. She hated the way that Dad came home with cuts and bruises and stories about punch-ups. Still, even as a little kid of three or four years old, I thought lacrosse was exciting. I played a few games in the ‘pee wees’, although I think I hit other kids with my stick more than I threw the ball.

  I think Dad’s tough childhood, much of which was spent living in Prahran’s housing commission flats, was the main reason he could handle himself so well in those lacrosse matches. Dad was actually born in Belgium to an Italian father, Peter Fevola (his real name was Pierre, but he anglicised it when he came to Australia), and a French mother, Monique. My grandfather was raised on the island of Cyprus and fought for the Axis nations when World War II broke out. After being captured by Allied troops, he spent a long time in a prisoner-of-war camp before being freed when the war ended.

  When Peter returned from the war, he and Monique married and settled down in a small town in rural Belgium, the country where they had met. They had four children—Carlo, Rita, my father Angelo and Paul. Peter spent a number of years working as a miner. Monique still has some of the kerosene lights that he used to carry down the mineshafts.

  Dad’s favourite memory of living in Belgium is of the family riding around on Peter’s small scooter. It was only a tiny machine, similar to the Vespas that have become so popular in Melbourne, but sometimes all four children would climb onto it and ride with their father around the streets. It must have been like what I’ve seen in Bali, whole families (and their chickens) riding along on a tiny motorbike.

  When he was only four years old, Dad developed really bad asthma due to all the dust in the air where the family lived, and the local doctor said that it could kill him. Dad’s parents faced a dilemma about where they should go. One of Dad’s uncles was already living in Melbourne, and after hearing some very favourable reports about the opportunities on offer in Australia, Peter and Monique made the rather bold decision to relocate their family to the other side of the world.

  In 1962, the Fevola family arrived in Australia. They had ‘bugger all’, as Dad puts it, and after settling into a small flat in Barkly Street, St Kilda, my grandparents worked tirelessly to ensure their children could enjoy a decent standard of living and a good education. Peter got a job as a vacuum-cleaner repairman for Godfreys at their main store in Caulfield, having learned many of the necessary skills during the war, and ended up working for the company for thirty years. My grandmother, meanwhile, worked as a waitress at night.

  The family lived in St Kilda for about ten years before they were selected to live in a housing commission flat in Prahran. They only had to pay a small amount of rent, but nevertheless they were still poor. The children would only get one small present each at Christmas, and they had to share a single pushbike. I once asked Dad what it was like living in the housing commission flats, and he said, ‘I learned a lot. Probably more bad than good.’ There were a lot of rough kids living there, so Dad, now a teenager, had to figure out how to look after himself. Mark ‘Chopper’ Read and his gang roamed the local streets, and Dad once fought Chopper’s mate ‘Mad Charlie’ Hegyalji, who became a notorious gangster, for an hour. ‘And held my own,’ he likes to say. Although he was right into lacrosse, Dad also grew to love Aussie Rules. He was a passionate supporter of the Prahran Two Blues in the VFA and could be found drinking Melbourne Bitter in the outer at Toorak Park on most Sunday afternoons.

  Mum’s family, both sides of which have been in Australia for several generations, also lived for a long period in the Prahran housing commission flats. Her father, Les, was a truck driver, while her mum, Faye, had a number of different jobs, the last of which was with the State Electricity Commission. My parents began their relationship as teenagers in the rough and tumble environment of Prahran and married in their early twenties. By the time I was born, on 20 January 1981, they were living in a one-bedroom apartment in South Yarra. Soon after my birth, Dad gained employment as a technician with the state government–owned Gas and Fuel Corporation, a job he really enjoyed. As part of his contract, we were able to rent a small house from the company outside its depot in Kaikoura Avenue, Hawthorn.

  I can still remember Kaikoura Avenue. It had big trees down either side that dumped tons of leaves on the road every autumn. I don’t really recall our house, but my favourite thing at the time was a stuffed toy version of Snoopy from the Peanuts comic strip. I loved my Snoopy dog, even though he got ragged and filthy. I took him everywhere with me. When I was only three years old, our street was flooded in a storm. I dropped Snoopy into the water outside our house and he got washed down a drain. I cried for ages after being told by Mum and Dad that they couldn’t get him back. It was like I’d lost everything. That feeling of loss is just as strong now as it was then.

  After living in Hawthorn for about four years, Mum and Dad had saved enough money to buy a block of land in the rapidly growing south-eastern suburb of Narre Warren, on which they built their first home. For battlers like us, Narre Warren was paradise. Our quarter-acre block, at the end of quiet Birch Court, was our version of the Australian dream. Our house was a classic suburban brick-veneer affair, fronted by a concrete driveway leading into a garage with a white roller door, and with a big grassed area out the back. Nowadays, Melbourne’s urban boundary is 20 kilometres beyond Narre Warren, out past Pakenham. But back then, we were on the frontier. Our house was the first one to be finished in that little court, and my parents were proud as punch when we moved in. My brother Jason was born soon after.

  The move from the inner city to the burbs changed my life in many ways. If we had stayed in Hawthorn, I probably would’ve stuck with lacrosse because the club where Dad played was just down the road. But at my new primary school, other than the odd session of basketball or tennis, the sporting choices were limited to cricket in the summer and footy in the winter, and that was that; it was not negotiable. Not that it mattered. I was happy to do whatever the other kids were doing, so footy became my new sporting love. Mum could hardly have been happier when I came home from school one afternoon and told her that my lacrosse-playing days were over. Thankfully, Dad wasn’t too upset that I was turning my back on his favourite sport. He was happy to support whatever choices I made.

  Our move to Narre Warren benefited me in another significant way. It was there that I met my lifelong friend Chris Newman, who has since achieved his own fame as an AFL player with Richmond. The Newman family bought the block of land next to ours. We first met them while their house was still being built, when Chris and his dad, Garry, knocked on our door to see if the young fella, who was busting, could use our loo. We soon started up a game of chasey around our house and we’ve pretty much been best mates ever since. It wasn’t long after the Newmans moved in that our games of court cricket and court footy began. Jason joined in, as did Chris’ older brother, Shane, who we loved—he was the oldest kid in the court, so we really looked up to him. There were another two boys a couple of houses down, and they were usually involved in our ‘Test’ matches and ‘blockbusters’. When we played footy, the goals—a couple of jumpers—would always lie on our driveway because it was at the end of the court. This meant that my parents were forever fixing broken windows.

  Chris and I would often play our own version of footy in my bedroom using rolled-up socks, with the middle of the bedroom door being the goals. During these games, we’d pretend to be our favourite AFL players. I’d usually be Lockett, Winmar and Loewe, while he’d be Silvagni, Kernahan and Bradley. I had initially flirted with being a Fitzroy supporter because Chris’ step-dad, who I thought was pretty good, barracked for the Lions. But my father was a St Kilda supporter and he eventually managed to lure me and my brother across to the Saints (my mum barracked for Richmond). Chris was a mad Carlton supporter. We had a book in which we entered the scores using textas, mine in red and black, his in navy blue. We had so much fun doing that stuff.

  If Chris was away, I’d play a game of sock footy on m
y own. I’d pretend to tackle myself on my bed, or I’d pretend that Chris’ Carlton boys had kicked the ball out on the full and then I’d kick a miraculous goal for St Kilda. The Saints always won when Chris wasn’t there. I’d usually wind up the game by pretending that the siren had gone, the Saints were 2 points down, and they had a shot on goal. If the rolled-up sock didn’t hit the right part of the door, I’d say, ‘Oh no, that guy’s run over the mark. He gets another shot!’ Those are some of my favourite memories. They were awesome times.

  Chris, Shane and I also participated in a lot of Little Athletics sessions in Dandenong. I was quite a good sprinter and I made the state final in the hurdles one year at Olympic Park. I was in front coming up to the second-last hurdle but I hit it and fell over. I was shattered. I was always pretty competitive, always wanted to win.

  Mum started taking me to sessions of Vickick (now known as Auskick) at the Narre Warren Junior Football Club. I loved footy training right from the start. Running around with stacks of other kids, chasing little plastic footballs—it was just my thing. I impressed the coaches with my skills, for which I had Shane Newman to thank. He taught me to kick during our court footy matches. Although he never made it to the AFL, Shane was a very good footballer in his own right and became a bit of a legend at the Beaconsfield footy club, one of Narre Warren’s rivals.

  I played my first game of footy when I was six years old, in an age group known as ‘the Midgets’. The coach, a local bloke by the name of Steve Moloney, named me to play on the wing. I can’t recall anything about the match, but Dad remembers it well. He always laughs when telling the story of how I lost interest in the game as soon as the ball disappeared into the opposition’s forward line. Rather than running towards the action, I sat down and started building sandcastles in the dirt that had been spread over the cricket pitch in the middle of the ground.

  As funny as that story is, it actually describes how attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has affected me since I was a kid. Basically, I have always found it hard to concentrate on things, and I’ve always been impulsive. Building the sandcastles seemed like a good thing to do at the time. I didn’t think about it, I just did it. I was like the Energizer Bunny when I was a kid—something always had to be happening, otherwise I’d get bored. This type of behaviour has been a constant throughout my life. Once I got a bit older, sport began to hold my concentration, but during my school years, teachers were constantly snarling at me for staring blankly out the window—I was usually daydreaming about kicking the footy during recess and lunchtime—or for disrupting my classmates by acting up. ‘Finds it hard to concentrate’ and ‘Should apply himself more’ were written on my school reports just about every year.

  Mum became aware of these issues when I was four or five years old and she developed a number of strategies to try and keep my impulsive nature under control. She would limit the amount of sugar in my diet, because she realised that I went crazy whenever I consumed sugary food. She made special rules for me at birthday parties or similar functions that featured junk food. While other kids scoffed fairy bread, Mum made me eat fruit. I drank water rather than cordial or soft drinks, and ate carob rather than chocolate. Carob tasted terrible, and it was embarrassing to have to eat that stuff in front of your mates.

  I realise now that Mum was hard on me at times because she was desperate for me to succeed in life. She wanted me to be more than just a battling wage-earner with a poor education, like so many people in her extended family. Mum’s tough parenting approach made quite a contrast to the way Dad went about things. A happy-go-lucky bloke, Dad was content to let me play up a bit, and when I was a kid I loved him for that.

  Life was great during our first couple of years at Narre Warren, but my world was turned upside down when my parents’ relationship started to break down. I was only eight when it finally came to a head and Dad moved out. While we remained in Birch Court, he went to live with his mate Steve Hamilton, who had a farm out near Cranbourne. The situation really upset me then and it still haunts me to this day. I couldn’t understand why Mum and Dad were unable to just get on with things and live happily together. For a year or so after their break-up, I naively believed that Dad would come back and everything would return to normal. But it never happened. Since then, I have always found it difficult to form meaningful relationships with people because I am burdened by the fear that things will disintegrate, like my parents’ marriage did.

  Being a single parent was really hard for Mum. I told her that I was going to step up and be the man of the house, but I was more of a hindrance to her than a help. Not only did Mum have to care for Jason and me, she had to work fulltime in the city to make ends meet. Her parents did a lot of babysitting and ferrying of us kids to and from sport, but they couldn’t do much to help our financial situation. Sometimes Jason and I would want takeaway for dinner, but we’d usually have to settle for two-minute noodles instead. I sometimes heard Mum crying in her bedroom and would then become upset myself. At times it made me feel really depressed, although I usually hid these feelings behind my class-clown personality. I rebelled against the whole saga of my parents’ break-up and divorce by getting into trouble at school. Unfortunately, this only made Mum’s life tougher, but she always did her best to make everything seem OK. For dinner, she’d make eggs in bread—frog in the pond, a lot of people called it—but she’d build it up like it was the most amazing, exciting feed. She’d rip a hole in the bread, crack the egg in, and we’d be going, ‘How good is this?’

  We were battlers. We didn’t go on flash holidays to Queensland. We went to Moama, across the Murray River from Echuca, where Mum’s parents owned a caravan. We went there every New Year’s Eve for years. When I was in my late teens, I spent many a night at the Shamrock Hotel in Echuca.

  Within a couple of years of my parents splitting up, Mum had a new partner, David Stephenson, a jeweller from Kew. I really resented it when he moved in with us. David was a nice enough bloke, and I understood that having him around had the potential to make life easier for Mum, both emotionally and financially. But I didn’t want a substitute dad living in my house. I just wanted my real father to come home. What made matters worse was the fact that I’m not the sort of person who opens up about these things. I just bottle everything up inside, until there comes a point when everything goes ‘bang!’ So I stewed about David living with us, and every now and then I’d blow up at him. I’d pack my bags and say I was going to go live with Dad, and I’d make Jason come with me. Jase was so young that he had no idea what was going on. We would walk out the front door and hide behind the car. Eventually, Mum would come and get us and we’d go back inside and she would try to make us feel good again.

  Dad never did come home, but Jason and I saw plenty of him while he was living out at Steve Hamilton’s farm. We had a great time mucking around with Steve’s son, Glenn, who became a really close friend. Having all that space was great, and we’d wake up in the morning to cows mooing in the backyard. Glenn and I played footy for hours out there. I’d love to say that I beat him during our matches, but he was mad and tough and I had to be on my guard to survive our fearful scrimmages.

  During that frustrating period after my parents separated, kicking a Sherrin around—whether it was in matches for Narre Warren, on the school oval, in Birch Court or in a mate’s backyard—was my answer to everything. By living and breathing footy, I was able to push away the heartache.

  3 KING OF THE KIDS

  A mid all the negatives brought on by Mum and Dad’s split, the one positive was that they were able to work out a reasonable custody arrangement, which meant that Jason and I rarely went more than a fortnight without seeing Dad. Still, it was a great boost to my spirits when I began to see him twice a week during the winter of 1990. The reason: he had accepted the ‘prestigious’ position of coach of my footy team, the Narre Warren JFC under-9 Zebras—the NWJFC actually had two under-9 teams, the other one being the Magpies, which is the club’s
nickname.

  I thought it was hilarious when Dad told me he had been appointed coach. I still have no idea how he talked his way into it. He had been on the footy club’s committee for a couple of years and had been the team manager and runner for the Zebras for two years running, but he knew next to nothing about Aussie Rules. Nonetheless, he approached the job with plenty of gusto and enthusiasm. He was really encouraging, although he didn’t mind giving us little fellas a bit of a rev-up from time to time.

  Under-9 games were roughly organised affairs—glorified training runs, really, with little emphasis on the scores. The matches only went for about an hour, and us little tackers basically spent the whole time chasing after the ball like a swarm of mosquitoes. When Dad took over as coach, I was starting my third and final year in the under-9s. It was 1990, the year the old VFL competition became the AFL, and when Collingwood broke its 32-year premiership drought by defeating Essendon in the Grand Final. Despite the inglorious start to my football career, when I had felt that building sandcastles was more fun than chasing the footy, I was now one of the Zebras’ best players. I was only of average height and lightly framed, but I had learned to read the play very well. Also, the footy field was basically the only place where I could concentrate for long periods, meaning I became completely devoted to getting the ball as many times as I could. My first under-9s coach, Mick Morland, had recognised that by presenting me with the team’s ‘Most Determined’ award in both 1988 and 1989.

  Brendan’s junior football days.

  A big bloke with a big moustache, Mick Morland was on his way to becoming one of the Narre Warren JFC’s longest-serving coaches. He would later serve as a City of Casey councillor for a number of years and would also enjoy a stint as mayor during the early 2000s. I think that Mick, whom I count as one of my lifelong friends (if ever I see him in the street, I always stop and have a chat), enjoyed the larrikin streak in my nature. I was always carrying on and making the other boys laugh; I loved being the centre of attention. The problem was that I just never knew when to stop mucking around, so Mick tried his best to instil some discipline into me. Whenever I did something stupid, he would make me run laps. As a result, I was forever jogging around the oval.